I, your correspondent John Arra, eyed the cold gray sky out the window. I checked my watch. Almost time to chalk up another slow winter Saturday at Freedom Salvage Curio Shop & Trading Post. To pass the last half hour before closing, I tried to think of an original idea for my next blog post.
John Arra is a pen name I use. My real last name begins with R and is fairly unique in these parts, or any parts actually. Because of the strong and contrarian opinions I express here from time to time, I don’t use my actual surname so that those few who share it with me don’t suffer guilt or embarrassment by association. They do anyway, but that’s on them, not me.
It’s “Arra” because in many parts of the South, especially among black southerners, that’s how the letter R is pronounced. I did not know this when my seventh grade Word Wealth teacher would call me John Arra. Only later in life did I realize he was making reference to a famous late night DJ on 1510 WLAC-AM out of Nashville named John Richbourg. That John Arra was white but he had a deep voice and sounded black, and that fit well with WLAC’s claim to fame at the time, which was to play soul music.
WLAC was a 50,000 watt blowtorch heard all over the continental United States after dark. John Arra the DJ on WLAC sold a lot of baby chicks that were shipped in the mail. But John Arra also introduced a heck of a lot of people to James Brown and Otis Redding and others who needed to be heard, so what was the harm in a little cultural appropriation?
Anyway, John Arra your correspondent was close to falling asleep at the shop desk that cold winter afternoon, when suddenly the door flew open with the usual squeak and crash of loose hinges and the flopping aluminum window blind. A man burst in, tall, vigorous, intent, seemingly on a mission. He might have been 60, maybe 70. Not the profile salvage store shopper. Most are women, closer to 80.
I greeted him and let him look around in peace. He moved directly and methodically from room to room and in minutes was at the checkout desk with several small items in hand. Now that’s a good customer! He sat in the chair to await the bottom line.
After some short friendly chatter, I realized I knew him. He was Mr. A’s son. Mr. A, the old gent who sold the homestead land in Houston County to me, the place I now affectionately call John Arra’s Erin-Tops Resort Home.
* * *
If you’ve heard this story before, you’ll just have to hear it again. I like to hear myself tell it.
I first met Mr. A when I came out from Nashville to look at some land he had for sale. 25 acres, and yes, the nice real estate lady said, there was water on it. Just come on out any time, she said, I didn’t need an appointment, and I could drive right in and look around to my heart’s content. She gave me directions.
I had been looking for land away from Nashville for seven years already. The city was growing like Topsy. I didn’t like the trend. Hurricane Katrina had hit New Orleans in 2005 and made me think, what if something like that hit Nashville? I started looking for land that year.
Then came the Nashville flood of 2010. It wiped out one of the two water treatment plants and the water came within inches of destroying the other one. I did not want to be standing in line for bottles of water if another natural disaster – or God knows what – came along. I wanted an escape valve, some place I could easily reach to be clear of urban chaos and to take care of those I love if need be. But finding just the right situation was proving difficult. It was already 2012. I redoubled my efforts. This placed sounded promising.
It was early summer but it was already hot as Hades – and humid. All of us native middle Tennesseans know that Hades will not just be hot but humid, too. That’s why we’re so well behaved; God gives us a taste of Hell every summer. So I got an early start on a Sunday morning and reached my destination about 8AM. I was in my trusty Jeep Cherokee, the same one whose bumper is pictured on the masthead of this blog.
Following the directions, I pulled off the state highway and watched for the realtor’s sign on the left. There were two entrances to the land there. An old beater truck with its driver door open was blocking one, so I went in the other. I slowly advanced down the dirt road lined by high brush and trees until it bottomed out at a creek where a crossroad ran along the creek, or straight ahead across the creek over a big pipe. I stopped to consider my options.
Right then a haint popped out of the weeds ahead of me! Might as well have been a haint. He did give me a start. It was a thin old man with stringy hair and dirty old worn out clothes that hung off him like a scarecrow’s. He had something in his hand, possibly a weapon. He was bent over a bit, squinting at me through the windshield, maybe ten feet in front of the Cherokee. I had a quick flashback of “Deliverance.”
Might as well get out, I thought. I didn’t come this far for the scenery. I opened the door and stood up.
“Good morning!” I said cheerfully. I still couldn’t tell what he had in his hand.
The old man looked at the ground and sort of cocked his head to one side.
“Well,” he said, “if it is, it ain’t got nuthin’ to do with me.”
Ah, I thought, once I got it: humor! He couldn’t be dangerous. I walked up to him and introduced myself, told him why I was there. The weapon in his hand turned out to be pruning shears.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That real estate girl told me you might be stopping by.”
He seemed relieved, too. “Mind if I lie down?”
At that point he lay right down on the dirt road – in the shade – and recommenced talking with me. “I’ve already been bush-hogging a couple of hours and this heat’s about done me in,” he said.
But he revived and rode with me in the Jeep to show me around. The hillside has an everflowing spring feeding the creek right out of a little cave pretty much in the middle of everything. That was love at first sight for me. There is more to the story, including Princess his fat little dog who was waiting in the truck for him and a county deputy who came by while we were talking. Mr. A cursed under his breath when we saw the cop. He was sure he was going to get after him about plates for the truck, but I could see what the cop was really doing amounted to a wellness check. This is a good place, I thought.
This long story short, Mr. A later tacked on three acres that included a house. It seemed at first little better than an Appalachian shack with no A.C. and spongy floors. But I am living in it to this day. Turns out, he built it himself. Along with several other houses in the area. I asked him one day how he did that, did he have an architect or what? “No,” he said, “I just ride down the road and get ideas and then I build ‘em.”
It took me an embarrassing long time to come up with the money. I figured I’d get a mortgage on it but the inspector said the place was below grade so the mortgage company backed out. The Dodd-Frank legislation had just been enacted and everyone on the transactional side of real estate was paranoid about doing the wrong thing. I had to go a very unconventional route to come up with the funds and I was just sure Mr. A would back out of the deal. But he didn’t. And nearly six months after that first meeting, the place was mine.
I think I made Mr. A mad when I called the real estate lady and asked her when he was going to remove the old truck that he left in front of the house. I was there when he came for it. He would barely talk to me. He and some lady friend pushed it out of the yard and then rolled it down the steep driveway.
Three months after that, my neighbor down the hill told me that Mr. A had died. I went to the service, graveside, in the cemetery across from the middle school. There were many in attendance. It was there that I’d met his son that one time before. Mr. A was laid to rest next to his daughter who had died as a child in a tragic accident 49 years earlier to the day he died.
Somehow, Mr. A never left my place. Not that he haunts it, but I think about him all the time. Whenever I make an improvement I wonder what he’d say about it. When it’s a hot morning and I can’t make it working outside past 10AM, I think, “Mind if I lie down?” I carry this not unwelcome feeling that I didn’t really buy the place, that he just chose to lend it to me.
* * *
So fast forward a dozen years. I no longer have the house in Nashville. I first moved my business from there to Charlotte for a couple of years, and then to Erin. I am winding the main business down and opening this salvage store just to stay busy and have some fun in retirement. That’s how I came to meet Mr. A’s son that slow, cold winter Saturday afternoon. Boy, was I eager to know more about Mr. A, and kindly, his son filled me in.
All those houses he built? He did all that with no more than a third grade education. And he did it without much help. He’d figured out a way to build a whole wall on the ground – the framing, the insulation, the windows, the wiring – then lift it somehow vertical and connect it to the next wall by himself. Nobody told him what to do or how to do it, and nothing stopped him from getting the job done.
Late in life, he took a tractor sideways on too steep a bank and it turned over on him, pinning him underneath with no one within shouting distance to call for help. He had a screwdriver in his pocket. He dug himself out from under that tractor with the screwdriver. It took him all day.
“Man,” I said, “he was a real Tennessean kind of guy, wasn’t he?”
“Yessir, that he was.”
“You can’t keep a real Tennessean down short of killing him.”
“I expect you’re right about that.”
That got me thinking. What is it about Tennessee? And Tennesseans?
It has been said about Southerners in general that we are marked by “irrepressible cussedness.” I have concluded that nothing describes the essence of the real Tennessean better.
Tennessee was once the frontier. It was the first wild west after the colonies for white Americans, and the first place the American Indians really took it to the whites, in a bloodletting that would last for nearly a hundred years as the frontier moved across the continent. Of course, that was mostly instigated and perpetuated in this area by the dastardly British and French. Nevertheless, it was what it was and those pioneers who came over the Appalachians to stake their claim to Tennessee were a hardy, contentious, thick-skinned and thick-skulled bunch. And funny. And creative. And all the while they were battling the Indians they were mixing with them, too, and bringing Africans into the mix as well, so Tennessee is about as melting-pot as it gets. More on that in later posts.
Bottom line, all those irrepressibly cussed Tennesseans were great unto themselves, just as Mr. A was, but the common greatness produced some especially exceptional men and women who embodied the very pinnacle of what it means to be a Tennessean – people like Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Montgomery Bell, and many others – whom I call “Iconic Tennesseans.” Heck, without Tennesseans, there would be no Texas. And no New Mexico. And no Hank Williams or Elvis Presley. More on all that later, too.
* * *
Over the next few nights, especially at the end of the day when I tend to have a shot or two of cheap Kentucky whiskey, I sat on my front porch before bed and assembled some random thoughts about the characteristics most common to the Iconic Tennessean. Here are a few of them:
– Not necessarily born here, but drawn to this place.
– Exceptionally bright, but not necessarily academically trained or suited.
– They have a vision that the mediocre or standard class of men cannot see, but may be drawn to.
– No one tells them what to think.
– They chafe at authoritarians, but often have a strong authoritarian streak themselves.
– They are not afraid to get their hands dirty.
– They may tend to be subject to a vice or two.
– They may have some degree of a political career, but it is never what they set out to do. They just have a charisma that almost makes it inevitable.
– Passionate – like Andrew Jackson’s white hot temper that made him prone to duels. They don’t tend to be a mellow lot.
– Spiritual – although they rarely warm a church pew, they have a strong sense of God or at least the supernatural.
– Not Good Family People – not for lack of testosterone or love, but their risk-taking, adventurous spirits make them challenging mates.
– They don’t mind getting a broken bone set or a wound sewed up, but you won’t find them a waiting room so that a doctor can speculate what might be wrong with ’em.
At bottom, what makes an Iconic Tennessean (an I.T.) is 100%, unadulterated, non-homogenized irrepressible cussedness (I.C.).
That whole thought process gave me the inspiration for this post. And more posts later, about the Iconic Tennesseans who shaped America because it seems that Tennesseans have gotten watered down in recent decades. Too many just to go with the times, a bunch of conformists and snowflakes who have lived too easy and shrink from a challenge. But if we reach down into the well and bring that essential trait to the forefront again, I believe real Tennesseans like Mr. A and the Iconic Tennesseans they produce can save America from the troubled times we face today.
Challenges like A.I., for example. Believe me, A.I. is no match for an I.T. fueled by I.C. But more on that later.
* * *
Shortly before Mr. A’s son left my shop, I mentioned how nervous I had been that I would fail to buy his dad’s place because of how long it took me to get the money together.
“Oh, I remember that,” he said. “ Dad had other offers. Even better offers. And with ready money.”
“Then why didn’t he take them?” I asked.
“Because he liked you. He wanted you to have the place.”
Now I feel bad about making him move that truck!
Ah, what the heck. Mr. A wouldn’t have been happy if he didn’t have something to fuss about. It was just a matter of one irrepressible cuss rubbing up against another.
* * *
I don’t know why Mr. A’s son came into my shop that cold winter afternoon. Maybe he has a thing for junk shops. Maybe he just did it on a lark. Maybe he knew it was my shop and he wanted to know something about the palooka who bought his dad’s land. But I’d like to think that he came in because Mr. A sent him.
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john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com